Start of Lettuce Harvesting

Today was the first day of harvesting lettuce and only my iceberg lettuce for now.  I will most likely start picking my Ruby glow hybrid in another week or so.  I will have to pick them before they begin to go to seed.

I also planted some flowers in the garden this past week.  I had some flowers that I had not planted in the garden and since they were beginning to outgrow their containers I needed to place them in various places throughout the garden.

I want to take a look at my iceberg lettuce that I picked this morning.  I had planned on picking them today because yesterday they received a good amount of rain which they needed.  I got a total of 70 leaves from this first harvest.

The leaves are a little dirty due to the rain from yesterday, but once I washed them they look very delicious to eat.

Here is a before and after shot of one of my lettuce plants just prior to harvesting.

You can see that I only took the bottom leaves and left a couple of the large ones on the plant.  I will be harvesting these leaves in the future, but I want the plant to recover before I pick them.  I don’t like to pick too much because this could force them to go to seed much earlier than normal.

I also had some flowers transplanted into the garden this week.  Some of the flowers included amaranthus, statice, and calendula.  These were some of the first flowers I planted, but the last to be added into the garden.  I put them randomly throughout because their main goal is to attract good insects along with honeybees and many others.

Here are some amaranthus flowers that are now in the garden.

Statice

Calendula

I did plant some more seeds of both calendula, dill, alyssum, and cosmos.  These won’t be sprouting for another couple weeks, but as long as I have enough soil I can keep on planting flowers.